How Nexus Weather & Climate opened a $200K airline opportunity in four months with Uptown’s LinkedIn Outbound
“I believe in your system, and it's changed our game.”
Challenge
Nexus saw a costly problem in aviation. It needed a way to find the people who would pay to solve it.
Nexus Weather & Climate provides forecasts tailored to specific locations and operating decisions. In aviation, that means helping teams decide when to refuel an aircraft, pause work on the ramp, or protect equipment ahead of a storm.
Co-founder Natasha McGrady, a former Navy fighter pilot and meteorology officer, saw an opportunity among the teams responsible for those decisions. Nexus already had early customers in cruise and hospitality, but aviation ground operations was a new vertical. When the campaign began, it had no customers in that market.
Finding buyers fell to a team of four. Natasha was handling sales, product development, business development, and government proposals. Cold email and existing relationships produced five to ten discovery calls a month, about half of them qualified. Developing another market meant finding and educating an entirely new set of decision-makers.
She had already started applying Uptown’s approach herself. After finding its YouTube channel, Natasha changed her cold email messaging, saw responses improve, and began using Sales Navigator. She and a colleague then spent two months running LinkedIn outreach by hand.
The challenge was finding enough relevant people. Searches for aviation pulled in hotel managers, restaurant managers, and airport parking businesses. A promising search might produce twenty people worth contacting. Building the lists, sending the messages, and managing the replies still depended on Natasha doing the work herself.
“This is me trying to reproduce myself without having to hire someone.”
Solution
Uptown built the aviation audience, ran the daily conversations, and used buyer feedback to refine the campaign.
Uptown combined job titles, company keywords, and recent LinkedIn activity to build an initial audience of roughly 1,000 prospects. The list focused on people active on the platform and excluded irrelevant businesses and companies Nexus was already speaking with.
The messaging came from the operating problems Natasha understood. When thunderstorms approached, ground crews could be left waiting for lightning before shutting down, then scrambling to recover the schedule. Starting with that situation gave buyers a concrete reason to discuss how they made weather decisions.
Uptown’s team manually sent connection requests, managed inbox conversations, followed up, and booked meetings from Natasha’s LinkedIn profile. Every two weeks, Natasha and her client success manager reviewed the responses and adjusted the campaign. Natasha brought her market expertise to those reviews and led the resulting sales conversations.
Uptown worked with Nexus to:
- Refine targeting from real replies. When broad management titles produced responses from airport hotels and restaurants, the campaign narrowed toward the people responsible for aviation operations.
- Expand the audience as Nexus learned the market. Insight from an industry partner helped identify additional buying roles, which Uptown researched and added to the campaign.
- Keep relevant prospects in the conversation through ongoing follow-up, monthly retargeting, and InMail outreach.
- Move interested buyers into sales conversations by handling scheduling and passing along the context Natasha needed to continue the discussion.
- Reinforce outreach with Thought Leadership Content. Two interviews became sixteen posts sharing Natasha’s expertise with the audience the campaign was building.
The conversations also gave Nexus direct feedback on its new market. Buyers described their operating problems in detail, helping Natasha understand which use cases mattered and which teams needed to be involved.
“You guys are proving my hypothesis in a great way.”
Results
Four months produced approximately $245,000 in pipeline, including a $200,000 opportunity with a regional airline.
The airline opportunity began when its chief operating officer replied to the LinkedIn outreach. Its flight operations manager responded a few days later, and the director of dispatch joined the discussions. Nexus began developing a proof of concept. By September, Natasha valued the opportunity at $200,000.
The business case centered on fuel planning. Broad thunderstorm forecasts could lead to carrying unnecessary fuel or making costly diversions. According to Natasha, the airline estimated that a single diversion cost about $100,000. Nexus could supplement the airline’s existing forecasts with information tailored to those operating decisions.
That gave the conversation a clear commercial focus: what better weather information could mean for the airline’s costs and operations.
In the first four months, the program produced:
- Approximately $245,000 in pipeline across three opportunities valued by Nexus, including the $200,000 airline opportunity in proof of concept
- 65 positive replies from aviation leaders, including airline executives, airport operations leaders, and senior leaders at ground services companies
- 357 conversations with prospects in the aviation campaign
- 1,737 aviation companies reached
- 1,283 new first-degree LinkedIn connections
- 9 meetings booked
Some prospects asked to continue by email, where Natasha could explore the use case and develop the opportunity directly. Interested buyers also included a major carrier’s chief flight sciences officer and the president and chief executive of an airline brand.
Natasha began the campaign looking for more conversations in a new vertical. The replies changed her view of what Nexus could sell there. The regional airline was evaluating a use case she had once doubted would justify bringing in a new vendor, and aviation opportunities were carrying larger price tags than Nexus’s previous markets.
With more than 1,280 new industry connections, Nexus also built an audience it can continue educating and approaching as new needs emerge.
“We're definitely going to stay on LinkedIn. I think it's been a really good outreach strategy for us.”
